Jake Wallis Simons (@JakeWSimons) is a Telegraph features writer, novelist and broadcaster. His website is jakewallissimons.com. Follow him on Facebook here and on Twitter here. His fourth novel, Jam, which is set in a traffic jam on the M25, is out now.

Good riddance to Nadine Dorries

Thank heavens. When Nadine Dorries, the outspoken, privilege-hating, Cameron-baiting Tory MP announced her plans to appear on the abomination that is I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, people all over the country hung their heads in shame at the degradation of British politics. Now Sir George Young, the new Chief Whip, has suspended Dorries, and we can all breathe easily again.

Dorries has always been a firework of an MP, spinning like a Catherine Wheel of fury when she feels slighted, and setting herself off like a rocket in pursuit of headlines. But this time she has overplayed her hand: her garden has proven too small to accommodate a banger of this magnitude, and it has blown up in her face. While the producers of that deleterious show will doubtless be rubbing their hands in glee at the new level of intrigue that has been added by her suspension from the parliamentary Tory Party, from Dorries’ point of view her dreams of reality television glory will be nothing but a damp squib. Chew on that, Dorries, when you’re tucking into your kangaroo testicle.

From the point of view of the Government, this has come at the right time. Sir George Young has had an appalling start to his tenure as Chief Whip, singularly failing to rally the troops for the EU debate last week, with the result that the Tories were – as strange as it sounds – outflanked by Labour to the right. Andrew Mitchell may have shown a lack of judgement when it came to dealing with irritatingly officious policemen, but he knew how to crack a whip all right; he is sorely missed. Dorries, however, has handed Sir George a golden opportunity to stamp his authority on the party. And stamp it he has.

Earlier this week, I wrote about the cancer that is an obsession with the private lives of celebrities, and the shameful way in which certain sections of the media indulge it. Most people would agree that politicians, as role models – if it is still possible to suggest that with a straight face – have a duty to represent a seriousness of purpose equivalent to their task. They are under enough pressure from the media as it is. Diving wilfully into the cesspit of reality television, and cocking a snook at important EU votes and the Chancellor’s mini-budget, is not just mightily infra dig, it is an insult to the very institution of democracy.

Can you imagine Gladstone taking on the “bushtucker trial”? Can you see Churchill removing his cigar to shovel woodlice and camel toes down his throat? Can you envisage them weeping as Ant and Dec, those baby-faced icons of inanity, threaten them with being “voted off?" No you can’t. But soon Dorries will be doing all of the above. And the nation will be laughing.

There is something rather sad about all this. What Dorries, in her solipsism, does not appreciate is that she has been invited onto the show for one reason: so that the television-watching public can engage in a mass orgy of schadenfreude at her expense. This will be an “expense” scandal purely of her own making; the producers are taking advantage of her vaingloriousness, and she is, in fact, being exploited. Not that there is anyone to blame but herself – they gave her the rope, and she is already hanging herself with it. Before even entering the jungle, she has made herself a laughing stock. She’d better get used to it.